Sustainability Strategies for Youth Advisory Boards: A Podcast on Youth Engagement

This podcast presents highlights from Sustainable Strategies, a one-day event organized by the Center for Court Innovation and Coro New York Leadership Center in September 2015. Representatives from 11 organizations discussed successes, challenges, and strategies used to meaningfully engage young people and elevate their voices in policy discussions through youth advisory boards. Members of youth justice boards also shared their experiences and insights with the group.    MARY WALLE: This is Mary Walle from the Center for Court Innovation, and you’re listening to the New Thinking podcast. Today’s conversation comes from Sustainable Strategies for Effective Youth Advisory Boards, a day-long convening of youth advisory board practitioners, held by the Center for Court Innovation and Coro New York Leadership Center thanks to the generous funding of the WB Clement and Jesse V. Stone Foundation. What are youth advisory boards? They are small programs run by nonprofit organizations and government agencies that bring the voices of young people into policy work. Sustainable Strategies brought together youth advisory board practitioners from across New York City to discuss their work to bring young people’s voices and ideas into meaningful policy change. In this podcast, you will first hear from four experienced youth advisory board practitioners about how their programs operate, the challenges they face, questions they grapple with, and best practices to keep in mind when designing and facilitating a youth advisory board program. Then, four youth advisory board program alumni will share their experiences in these programs and the impact that membership has had on their lives. We’ll start by hearing from Brooke Richie-Babbage, the founder and executive director of the Resilience Advocacy Project. Here, she discusses the mission, structure, and challenges of Resilience Advocacy Project’s youth advisory board work. BROOKE RICHIE-BABBAGE: Our mission is to empower youth to become leaders in the fight against poverty. We train young people in these spaces to identify social justice issues that they are passionate about in their communities, and then to develop concrete community impact initiatives in response to those problems. They spend a year becoming an expert on their campaign topic, and then every campaign culminates in an event. The event is designed to bring youth and adult leaders into the same space to discuss and develop recommendations to push for change. WALLE: Brooke also discussed the challenges and tensions organizations may face when the youth participants, not adult staff, are by design in charge of the direction and the work of the program. RICHIE-BABBAGE: This level of youth leadership makes me uncomfortable. I believe in it, right? I started this organization. But the messiness of it, and not knowing before the citywide town hall meetings what is going to happen at the end can make it difficult both for me personally and as an executive director to identify funding and resources and to know where our partnerships and work are going to go, because I am not the one picking the topic. How do you build a structure and build on successes when you’re not in charge of that aspect of guiding the ship? On the flip side, I think that the work is much more diverse in ways that I don’t know that our staff who are deeply committed to youth leadership, and, quite frankly, better at it than me, would even have paid attention to it. It was really our youth leaders who were out there doing the recruitment that said, “We also need to pay attention to things like age.” The dynamic of a room where everybody’s a senior except for two people matters. That changes things in how we do work. We need to pay attention to the fact that a lot of young people have to work after school. If, in order to be involved, you actually need to be here two days a week, who are we then saying can’t be involved without actually saying that? That voice and that perspective came from our young people, so the fact that they guide our recruitment and the way that the body itself is formed, I think is very powerful. WALLE: Brooke went on to explore the challenges her organization faces in running a youth advisory board. RICHIE-BABBAGE: I just want to highlight a couple of the tensions or questions, really, that have come out of this youth leadership work and the youth council in particular, again, against a backdrop of an organization that believes in leadership but practices it in different ways. The first is, how does this group fit into our larger organizational programmatic and policy advocacy structure? There’s a real tension between remaining nimble and responsive to what they say they are interested in, and also running an organization and having a program that is accountable for outcomes to funders. Second is infrastructure. If we want them to have a real system impact, how do we have a program that has a beginning and an end, that has some kind of structure that is measurable and that allows the participants to feel like they are achieving something and yet is also acknowledging of the fact that if we’re serious about them having a system impact that takes longer than a year. Rep’s board has identified five core social justice issues around which we want to have an impact. What do we do if young people want to focus on something that’s not on that list, and how do we guide their choice without making it not a meaningful choice? Finally, who decides and enforces the rules of the group? Group work, for those of you who do it, is hard. It’s messy. Striking the right balance between being adult experts and facilitators in a room and also allowing the young people to grapple with the messiness of becoming true leaders is difficult. WALLE: Next, we’ll hear from Linda Baird, associate director of youth justice programs at the Center for Court Innovation and former Youth Justice Board program coordinator. The Center founded the Youth Justice Board in response to the realization that the young people the Center worked with did not have a voice at the table where decisions were being made that would affect their lives. Linda discusses the program’s goals and its challenges. LINDA BAIRD: The goal of the program is to bring the voices of young people into policymaking and have them be able to give their input on issues that affect them. We really try to caution young people this isn’t just a program where you say, “I found all this stuff is wrong. That’s too bad.” Then we ask them to take the next step, “And what can you do about it as a young person? What are your ideas to fix it?” – because adults don’t often hear these. WALLE: Building on Brooke’s earlier comments, Linda talked about how the program faced the realities of changing policy. BAIRD: As everybody in this room probably is aware, the timeline for policy change … Unfortunately, I have not figured out how to make it align with the school calendar. We have thought about, in our implementation phase, what we can do so that young people can have a few really credible, meaty projects that come out of that period. Even with adding a full extra year on the topic of study, we at the Center realize that that doesn’t necessarily mean the issue is wrapped up and that our work is done. WALLE: Brooke and Linda brought up many important questions to consider while designing and facilitating youth advisory board programs. Up next, Laura Jankstrom, Youth Action NYC program coordinator, from the Citizens’ Committee for Children, discusses how its youth programs are structured in response to similar questions. LAURA JANKSTROM: The Youth Action Community Leadership course is the point of entry into the Youth Action program for interested students. At the end of the ten-week course, the students are eligible to become Youth Action members. This is the real youth-led piece of what we do. These guys meet every week for a couple of hours on Wednesdays for the duration of the school year, and they pick the topics that they want to work on, and they pick the types of projects that they want to do. For some of their projects, they want to stick to the traditional “We want to research this issue, we want to create policy recommendations, and we want to meet with elected officials to educate them on what we found.” They want to feel an impact immediately. They don’t want to wait for the policy change to be made a year, two years, three years down the line. It’s a lot of times difficult to follow an issue if it’s not something that the news is really covering a lot, and so kids aren’t seeing movement on them. I can’t just send them an article and say, “Hey, see what’s happening with the issue that we’re working on.” A lot of that is really done behind the scenes. An example I have, one semester, we were doing teen mental health, and one of the recommendations that our group brought was that there should be a teen suicide awareness day in New York City. The following year, councilmember Steve Levin introd...